The Tara Pacific program involved a 2-year continuous scientific expedition at sea to reveal new facets of coral reef biodiversity in the Pacific Ocean.
Using a coordinated approach to systematically sample coral reef ecosystems across the Pacific Ocean, this project aimed to provide a baseline of the complexity of the coral animal, its microbial community, and the coral reef ecosystem, by shedding light on the links between genomes, transcriptomes, metabolomes, organisms and ecosystem function. This Collection of 9 first articles highlights research published across the Springer Nature portfolio from this ambitious project.
The Tara Pacific expedition and program are unique and incomparable and will provide several years’ worth of material for large-scale analyses of coral ecosystem diversity. This program is unique in that samples were collected following the same protocol across multiple locations and years, with corals being screened in an identical manner at each site, rendering them fully comparable and linking their physiology to a large set of in situ and historical environmental data. The Tara Pacific expedition and program is not only the largest genotyping study conducted on a marine system, but it also represents a significant and large effort towards structuring and managing ecosystem-scale data to make them ‘open access’ and available to a broader community. By presenting summaries of our preliminary results above, we demonstrate the potential of such datasets for addressing major questions in the field of coral research. Answering these questions will lead to a better understanding of the conservation issues facing this unique ecosystem. It is our hope that the open-access data from the Tara Pacific expedition will provide an avenue for addressing these outstanding questions in coral reef research.
Reference: Serge Planes, Denis Allemand &TARA-Pacific coordinators & consortium (including LSCE). Nature Communications 14, 3131 (2023) & 9 first major scientific articles published by Springer Nature (June 2023) https://www.nature.com/collections/adgaiffggg
- Lombard F. et al. (2023)Open science resources from the Tara Pacific expedition across coral reef and surface ocean ecosystems. Sci. Data. Doi : 10.1038/s41597-022-01757-w
- Belser C. et al. (2023)Integrative omics framework for characterization of coral reef ecosystems from the Tara Pacific expedition. Sci. Data Doi : 10.1038/s41597-023-02204-0
- Noel B. et al. (2023) Pervasive gene duplications as a major evolutionary driver of coral biology. Genome Biol. Doi : 10.1186/s13059-023-02960-7
- Galand P.E. et al. (2023) Diversity of the Pacific Ocean coral reef microbiome. Nat. Commun. Doi : 10.1038/s41467-023-38500-x
- Hochart C. et al. (2023) Ecology of Endozoicomonadaceae in three coral genera across the Pacific Ocean. Nat. Commun. Doi : 10.1038/s41467-023-38502-9
- Veglia A.J. et al. (2023) Endogenous viral elements reveal associations between a non-retroviral RNA virus and symbiotic dinoflagellate genomes. Commun. Biol. Doi : 10.1038/s42003-023-04917-9
- Armstrong E. J. et al. (2023) Host transcriptomic plasticity and photosymbiotic fidelity underpin Pocillopora acclimatization across thermal regimes in the Pacific Ocean. Nat. Commun. Doi : 10.1038/s41467-023-38610-6
- Voolstra C.R. et al. (2023) Disparate genetic divergence patterns in three corals across a pan-Pacific environmental gradient highlight species-specific adaptation. npj Biodiversity Doi : 10.1038/s44185-023-00020-8
- Rouan A. et al. (2023) Telomere DNA length regulation is influenced by seasonal temperatures differences in short-lived but not in long-lived reef-building corals. Nat. Commun. Doi :10.1038/s41467-023-38499-1